I'm sitting in the state Assembly session and they're debating the bill that would put New Jersey back into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

This is frightening.

Assemblyman John McKeon just stated that "Carbon emissions deplete the ozone layer."

What the hell?

McKeon, who is a Democrat from West Orange, has been working on this issue for several years now. I know that because I saw him pulling away from an Assembly hearing on RGGI in his big SUV back in 2007.

That was five years ago and he's been pushing the theory of global warming ever since. Yet he still has no clue just what that theory is.

The issue of depletion of the ozone layer and the issue of global warming are two separate issues.

It's chlorofluorocarbons that are suspected of depleting the ozone layer.

That has nothing to do with the goal of RGGI and the theory of global warming. That theory holds that CO-2 causes a greenhouse effect by reflecting heat back to the planet. The ozone debate is separate.

The theory of anthropogenic global warming is hotly debated among scientists. But McKeon clearly does not know even the basic terms of that debate.

In the Democrat's defense, Republican Christie Whitman made the same mistake back when she was commissioner of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Here's an excerpt from a column I did on that in 2001:

When it comes to atmospheric pollution, Christie's a bit of an airhead, said Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute. He directed me to look up Whitman's response to a New York Times reporter's question about global warming at the time of her nomination to the EPA.

"Clearly there's a hole in the ozone, that has been identified. But I saw a study the other day that showed that that was closing," she told the Times.

When informed by the reporter that she was talking about the wrong issue, Whitman refused to acknowledge her mistake. She insisted the greenhouse effect and the ozone layer are interrelated. Which they are, but only in the sense that both take place up there in the sky. As one environmentalist put it, "That's a little bit like the Treasury secretary being asked about currency fluctuations and answering about interest rates."

But that was 11 years ago. For the sponsor of a bill on such a crucial issue to be unaware of that distinction today is just plain weird.

Even weirder, not a single legislator caught the obvious error.

Yet the bill passed easily. In other words, a majority of members of the state Assembly are perfectly content to endorse the idea that your electricity rates must be raised to keep CO-2 from depleting the ozone layer - which it doesn't do.

That should tell you all you need to know about the alarmism being promoted by the global-warming crowd. RGGI is a form of cap-and-trade, and cap-and-trade is all about enriching the traders, such as Blood and Gore.

As for the science, these guys don't have a clue. The bill passed on party lines, 45-33. That means I just witnessed 45 Democrats vote for a bill to curb global warming by protecting the ozone - or at least so they assumed.

Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen anticipated this sort of thing: